A Companion to the Latin Language by Clackson James

Author:Clackson, James
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

Literary Registers of Latin

CHAPTER 19

The Language of Roman Comedy

Wolfgang de Melo

Introduction

Roman comedy is not a uniform genre. The type that is best attested is the fabula palliata, “comedy in Greek dress”, named after the pallium, a Greek cloak which some of the actors wore. Its most significant exponents are Titus Maccius Plautus (died in 184) and Publius Terentius Afer (c. 185–159), the only comic playwrights of whom complete plays survive.1 In addition we have fragments of Lucius Livius Andronicus and Gnaeus Naevius, both of them predecessors of Plautus; and of Caecilius Statius (died in 168), a contemporary of Terence, whose style closely resembles that of Plautus rather than Terence.2 All fabulae palliatae were based on Greek originals; in a few cases we are fortunate enough to be able to compare Greek fragments with their Latin counterparts.3 The fabula togata, “comedy in Roman dress”, is a spin-off of the fabula palliata. Some of the actors wore togas, the Roman national dress, and the plays were set in Italy. Not many fragments survive.4 The most important authors are Titinius, probably an older contemporary of Terence, Lucius Afranius, who belongs to the late second century, and Titus Quinctius Atta, who died in 77. A third type of comedy is the fabula Atellana, named after the Oscan town Atella. The genre remained oral for a long time. We have about 300 lines from a scripted version of it by Lucius Pomponius and Quintus Novius, both from the early first century BCE.5 A genre related to comedy is the mimus or “mime”, consisting of the performance of improvised sketches. Mime became literary only in the late Republic. Its best-known authors, Gnaeus Matius, Decimus Laberius and Publilius Syrus, all lived in the first century BCE.6

Plautus is an author of whom we have complete plays as well as fragments coming down to us mainly through the grammarians. Interestingly, the language of the two sources does not correspond closely. The reason is that grammarians cite Plautus for his grammatical oddities, which mostly do occur in the directly transmitted comedies as well, but much more rarely. If we had only the fragments, our picture of Plautus would be distorted. Consequently, we cannot form a fully reliable picture of the language of the fragmentary playwrights either, and our main focus has to be on Plautus and Terence.

The language of Plautus and Terence is by no means uniform. There are diachronic differences between the two authors. Moreover, within each author individual character types like old men or soldiers have different speech patterns. There are also different literary genres within comedies, again with different linguistic characteristics, for instance letters, prayers or of course dialogue. And finally, there is an important distinction between spoken passages in senarii, recited passages in “long verses” (trochaic septenarii, etc.) and sung passages in other metres.7 Especially in Plautus the long verses and sung passages are marked by a higher incidence of certain figures of speech and archaisms.8

In what follows, I shall examine the language of Roman comedy, beginning with spelling, phonology and metre.

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